Johan Anthony Willem "Hans" Kamp (born 5 September 1940) is a Dutch philosopher and

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

, responsible for introducing

discourse representation theory In formal linguistics, discourse representation theory (DRT) is a framework for exploring meaning under a formal semantics approach. One of the main differences between DRT-style approaches and traditional Montagovian approaches is that DRT inclu ...

(DRT) in 1981. Kamp was born in

Den Burg Den Burg is a town in the Dutch province of North Holland. It is a part of the municipality of Texel on the island of the same name, and lies about 12 km north of Den Helder. Overview Located in the middle of the island, Den Burg is the larg ...

. He received a Ph.D. in Philosophy from UCLA in 1968, and has taught at

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...

University of London The University of London (UoL; abbreviated as Lond or more rarely Londin in post-nominals) is a federal public research university located in London, England, United Kingdom. The university was established by royal charter in 1836 as a degree ...

University of Texas, Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...

, and

University of Stuttgart The University of Stuttgart (german: Universität Stuttgart) is a leading research university located in Stuttgart, Germany. It was founded in 1829 and is organized into 10 faculties. It is one of the oldest technical universities in Germany wit ...

. His dissertation, ''Tense Logic and the Theory of Linear Order'' (1968) was devoted to

functional completeness In logic, a functionally complete set of logical connectives or Boolean operators is one which can be used to express all possible truth tables by combining members of the set into a Boolean expression.. ("Complete set of logical connectives").. (" ...

tense logic In logic, temporal logic is any system of rules and symbolism for representing, and reasoning about, propositions qualified in terms of time (for example, "I am ''always'' hungry", "I will ''eventually'' be hungry", or "I will be hungry ''until'' I ...

, the main result being that all temporal operators are definable in terms of "since" and "until", provided that the underlying temporal structure is a continuous

linear ordering In mathematics, a total or linear order is a partial order in which any two elements are comparable. That is, a total order is a binary relation \leq on some set X, which satisfies the following for all a, b and c in X: # a \leq a ( reflexi ...

. Kamp's 1971 paper on "now" (published in ''

Theoria Christian mysticism is the tradition of mystical practices and mystical theology within Christianity which "concerns the preparation f the personfor, the consciousness of, and the effect of ..a direct and transformative presence of God" ...

'') was the first employment of double-indexing in

model theoretic In mathematical logic, model theory is the study of the relationship between formal theories (a collection of sentences in a formal language expressing statements about a mathematical structure), and their models (those structures in which the st ...

semantics Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy Philosophy (f ...

. His doctoral committee included

Richard Montague Richard Merritt Montague (September 20, 1930 – March 7, 1971) was an American mathematician and philosopher who made contributions to mathematical logic and the philosophy of language. He is known for proposing Montague grammar to formalize th ...

as chairman, Chen Chung Chang,

Alonzo Church Alonzo Church (June 14, 1903 – August 11, 1995) was an American mathematician, computer scientist, logician, philosopher, professor and editor who made major contributions to mathematical logic and the foundations of theoretical computer scienc ...

, David Kaplan,

Yiannis N. Moschovakis Yiannis Nicholas Moschovakis ( el, Γιάννης Μοσχοβάκης; born January 18, 1938) is a set theorist, descriptive set theorist, and recursion (computability) theorist, at UCLA. His book ''Descriptive Set Theory'' (North-Holland) is ...

, and

Jordan Howard Sobel Jordan Howard Sobel (22 September 1929 – 26 March 2010) was a Canadian- American philosopher specializing in ethics, logic, and decision theory. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, Canada. In addition to his areas of ...

. Kamp became a corresponding member of the

Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences ( nl, Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, abbreviated: KNAW) is an organization dedicated to the advancement of science and literature in the Netherlands. The academy is housed ...

in 1997. He was awarded the

Jean Nicod Prize The Jean Nicod Prize is awarded annually in Paris to a leading philosopher of mind or philosophically oriented cognitive scientist. The lectures are organized by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique as part of its effort to promote in ...

in 1996 and was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2015.

Publications

* Kamp, Hans
'A Theory of Truth and Semantic Representation'.
In J. Groenendijk and others (eds.). ''Formal Methods in the Study of Language''. Amsterdam: Mathematics Center, 1981. * Kamp, Hans and Uwe Reyle
`From Discourse to Logic: Introduction to Modeltheoretic Semantics of Natural Language, Formal Logic and Discourse Representation Theory'.
Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994.

References

1940 births Living people People from Texel Linguists from the Netherlands 20th-century Dutch philosophers Semanticists Jean Nicod Prize laureates Members of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences University of California, Los Angeles alumni Academic staff of the University of Stuttgart {{Netherlands-linguist-stub

Publications

See also

References